“... be not banned but ‘battled’ with, in open debate. For example, the Battle of Ideas I attended took place the week after Nick Griffin’s turn on Question Time, so there was lots of talk about ‘the right to be offensive’ and ‘illiberal liberalism’, while at the same time it was made clear that the principle of free speech was being defended, not ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... ethos into a few schools in Birmingham’. The so-called Trojan Horse scandal spread until it took in more than twenty schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”

“... His father, Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore’s second founding father – would have agreed. When he took power at the head of the anti-colonial People’s Action Party (PAP) more than half a century ago, LKY followed the advice of his Dutch economic adviser not to remove the statue of Raffles from Singapore harbour: it would be foolish to retire such a beacon ...”

“... no souvenir Amikejo flags, no reproduction postage stamps, nothing. The inn where the inhabitants took their solemn decision for Esperanto became the Skyline Disco, which is now a rain-filled hole in the ground. Only the stone border markers in the woods survive, topped with snow and laced with dead brambles. There’s a reason for the amnesia. This corner of ...”

“... thought to be everywhere. This was the milieu in which Maoism in the strict sense emerged, and Xi took to it. In 1943, at Mao’s direction, he led a purge in Suide County (he was not beyond torture or execution). In the later years of the civil war, he persuaded two influential Nationalist leaders in Yulin to defect to the Communists along with their ...”

“... that the North Koreans had failed to honour their commitments, and the enriched-uranium programme took on a life of its own in the US media. In November 2002, the CIA reported that a gas centrifuge facility for enriching uranium was ‘at least three years from becoming operational’ in the DPRK; once up and running, however, it might provide fissile ...”

“... endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Tony Curtis shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack ...”

“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... temporary replacement, Miss Anderson, but with the wonderfully named Elspeth Champcommunal, who took over in time for the 1916 Christmas edition, informing readers that ‘the Parisienne’s day is not complete unless she wears the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more fashion-conscious than Todd; she knew people like Paul Poiret – the first person ...”

“... jump come the next, surely imminent election.By chance, in between visits to St Albans, business took me to other Remainian strongholds. After Bath, Edinburgh and St Albans in one week, I began to feel like a character in an implausible dystopian novel from the early 2000s. ‘It is the year 2019, and Britain is divided into two nations, Remainia and ...”

“... even briefly became an improbable object of adulation in the Sunni Arab world). But though he took pride in Hizbullah’s performance on the battlefield, he was chastened by the ferocity of Israel’s bombardment, and acknowledged that his movement’s cross-border hostage-taking operation had offered Israel a pretext to destroy large parts of Lebanon, a ...”

“... she had become ensnared in what she later called an ‘escape marriage’; she then divorced and took up a career in art, first in St Louis and afterwards in Chicago, where she studied at the Art Institute and frequented the circle of writers associated with Poetry magazine, the journal in which Pound published his earliest verse and most provocative ...”

“... of the Past’ dwells on a moment of utter captivation experienced by the young Woolf as she took in the sweep of gardens stretching down the slope below Talland House, the family’s holiday home in St Ives. ‘The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete ...”